School Funding Campaign

Fair and Adequate School Funding Update June 17

Education on the Doorstep May 2017

School Funding Parents’ Guide May 2017

School Funding Campaign. £67,000

..is the amount of money that Clyst Vale would LOSE under the new “fairer” funding formula proposed by the Government. Clyst Vale students, like all students in Devon, are already funded at £290 each below the national average.

Therefore, we have joined with schools in Devon and twelve other counties in an organised protest against this proposal. This has received national media attention from BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News.

The thirteen counties  acknowledge that there is a need for a fairer formula, and that the Government is operating under financial pressure itself, but the letter to MPs includes the following:

There is no question that a new National Funding Formula is urgently required, but it must be credible and reverse the unsustainable and deeply unsatisfactory methodology that is currently used to allocate school funds.

Rather than making matters better, the new National Funding Formula proposals do not offer meaningful solutions to our current and future school finances. Amongst many issues, key points that remain include:

• The new National Funding Formula is not new. It is based on a flawed and outdated model.
• As a consequence, considerable and completely unacceptable inequalities will persist in our school funding arrangements.
• The new National Funding Formula attempts to ignore inflationary cost pressures that all schools are enduring.
• The Department for Education does not know what the minimum funding required for an individual pupil is, and how this relates to minimum school funding for a school to adequately resource staffing and equipment.
• The assumption that schools all have ‘further efficiencies’ to make is fundamentally flawed, especially for those schools that have been severely low funded for an extended period of time.

To make matters worse – far worse – the Department for Education continues to divert significant monies to capital and revenue funding such as Free School provision and Grammar School expansion and this does not always guarantee value for money. At the same time, our schools simply do not have adequate funds to provide the education that every child in our care needs and deserves.

To see such ill-judged spending being prioritised in a time of austerity is unacceptable. The disconnect between a Department making decisions that seem to entirely ignore the wishes and needs of dedicated and committed school leaders provides significant and tangible cause for concern.

School leaders simply want a reasonable settlement that sees every child in every school adequately funded. There is no question that schools with differing contextual challenges should be funded differently but this should not come at the expense of allowing every school to operate effectively on behalf of the pupils’ families and communities that we serve.